


Et Dolore Magna Gloria

by MeansToOffend (goodmorning)



Series: Hockey RPF One-Shots [5]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: 5+1 Things, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, this is actually barely even fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 20:03:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12327903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodmorning/pseuds/MeansToOffend
Summary: or; 6 times Lu tries to comfort one of his backups, +1 time one of his backups tries to comfort him.





	Et Dolore Magna Gloria

**1\. Tommy Salo, 1997**

Lu is drafted higher than any goaltender in history. It feels weird, and he’s honestly waiting for them to say, “Oh, no, wait, there was a mistake, we really meant to pick up someone else. You can just go home, we don’t actually want you.” He gets through the pictures and the interviews, though, and nobody sends him away, and it really starts to sink in: this is real, he’s going to be an Islander, even if he fucks up now they’re still going to give him a shot because they picked him so high. 

So he’s sat there, in some kind of quiet little room off to the side of everything that a very efficient woman in a black pantsuit told him to stay in until she came back, and the door opens. He stands, because he expects it to be her, and that he’ll have to go somewhere, but it’s not her.

It’s Tommy Salo.

“Polite, rookie,” he says with a snort. “Sit, though. They want me to talk to you.”

“Oh. What about?” Lu asks.

“Honestly? No idea,” says Salo, and they sit quietly for quite some time. Lu does his best not to stare, but he can feel Salo sizing him up. It’s a little disquieting, but he’s accidentally fooled his probable future starter into thinking he’s polite, and he’s not about to do anything to change that now. 

Lu closes his eyes, and breathes. He snaps them open again when Salo speaks.

“You’re going to be pretty good, they say.”

“I hope so,” Lu says, and then they’re quiet again. This time he lets himself look, a bit, at Salo. They both pretend he isn’t.

That’s when he sees it: Salo is nervous. But it makes sense, really. He’s just coming off his first season as an NHL starter, and they missed the playoffs, and here comes Lu with his high, high hopes and his high, high pick.

“I’m not going to take your job,” he says, and hopes fervently he’s not lying.

The woman in the pantsuit comes for him then, ready to take him to yet another interview. Salo nods at Lu as they go.

It’s the last time Lu talks to him as a member of the same team.

**2\. Trevor Kidd, 2002**

It turns out Mad Mike doesn’t want Lu after all, and he ends up in Florida. 

Florida is actually really fucking nice. It doesn’t snow, and there are beaches, and he can play golf whenever he wants, and there’re a couple casinos nearby when he gets a hankering for a little poker.

He also becomes the starter, sort of.

Really it’s more of a tandem situation, but he does edge Kidder in minutes. Lu doesn’t say it out loud, but he think to himself that it pretty much counts. It makes him feel good about himself, anyway, and it doesn’t hurt anyone else, so why not?

Kidder is usually pretty quiet in the room, though when he does speak everyone hears him, voice loud and deep and, after wins, jovial-clear. When he laughs, Lu always feels like he’s in on the nicest kind of joke, the kind that doesn’t involve anyone getting hurt or embarrassed. But Kidder doesn’t laugh very much.

Part of that is the team; they kind of suck, and wins are few and far between, and that’s enough to get anyone pretty down. The other part, though, Lu doesn’t find out until after his second season with the team.

It’s also the second consecutive season with a bare 22 wins between them, and Lu thinks that’s all it is when Kidder sits down in full gear and sighs into his glove. It’s the last game of the year, and he just took the loss in OT - who wouldn’t be disappointed? So Lu takes his time getting out of his pads, waiting until it’s just the two of them left in the room, and looks back at him.

Kidder is still in full pads. His face is still in his glove. But now, his shoulders are shaking. 

Lu feels really inadequate to this.

“Aw, man, your tears are gonna mess up your glove,” he tries, knowing it’s the wrong thing to say as soon as he says it.

But Kidder looks at him. “First of all, I sweat all over it anyway. A few tears ain’t gonna change shit. Second, what the hell is even the point?”

“Well, there’s always next season-”

“Honestly, I’m not so sure about that,” Kidder says, and stops to take a deep breath, eyes closed. “I didn’t want to tell anyone, but… My shoulders are pretty much fucked. I’ll be lucky if I’m even still in the league next year.”

There’s nothing to say to that. Platitudes aren’t going to make it better, not really, and they might make it a lot worse. Lu kneels down, starts unlacing Kidder’s pads and skates, trying to buy himself some time to think. He’s also trying not to cry.

Finally, he has it. “I know you, Kidder. I know you did the PT and tried your hardest. And I also know that I couldn’t tell anything was wrong with you at all until you told me. You’ll have a next year.”

Kidder’s face goes back in his glove, and his shoulders - his whole, damaged shoulders - shake again. Lu is about to freak out, to try and call someone, anyone, until Kidder moves his glove and laughs right in Lu’s face.

“Sorry, kid,” he says when he finally catches his breath. “You were just so earnest…” He breaks off laughing again, and Lu, as always, can’t help but laugh with him.

Kidder gets bought out that summer.

But he does get a next year.

**3\. Jamie McLennan, 2006**

Lu runs through a backup a year now. It’s hard on him, his most important part of the team changing before he gets the chance to build his game around them. He feels lonely, sometimes. The rest of the guys are great, but none of them know what it’s like to be there, alone in that crease, knowing with every loss that the buck stops where the puck didn’t. And the backups are nice guys, really, but they don’t talk to him like he wants to be talked to.

They don’t talk to him like he’s a friend.

Until Noodles.

Noodles walks into the room on day one with a big dumb smile on his face and makes a beeline straight for Lu. And, just like that, they’re friends.

Which is a good thing, because Lu is frankly exhausted by him on the ice. He really wasn’t meant to play 75 games in an 82-game season, even if he is in his prime. Noodles has been around the league, and he’s a decent backup, but the defense really isn’t up to the standards of his previous teams, and it shows.

But every time he gets pulled, Noodles puts on his best ‘aw, shucks’ demeanour, and apologises, and Lu really can’t be mad at him. They do a spot with a zamboni and it’s all just fun. It even makes him forget that their contracts are both expiring this season. 

It’s when Lu is in the middle of contract negotiations, fighting to keep Noodles with him for another few years despite the extra workload, that Noodles sits him down. Lu almost tells him all about it, but Noodles speaks first.

“I’m going back to Calgary,” he says, and Lu’s heart sinks. “I know I won’t be the starter there, but it’ll put me in a better position to try. And I know it’s not even realistic to hope for it, at my age, but I can’t help it.” He smiles apologetically. “I wish you could come with me.”

“You’ll be a starter,” Lu says, and smiles back to keep himself from crying.

He signs in Vancouver the next day.

A year later, Noodles is starting, at last - in Japan.

**4\. Cory Schneider, 2011**

There’s a kid coming up in Vancouver that the coaches don’t seem to know is something special. He’s got bright blue eyes so pale that they make his laser-sharp focus seem obvious, and a good sense of how a play is going to break down in front of him, and, most importantly, a sharp and sly sense of humour, and it’s got Lu pretty excited to share the crease with him when he makes it as a full-time guy. 

As it turns out, that year is the year they win the Presidents’ Trophy, and as they take each successive playoff series in fewer and fewer games it really starts to feel like luck is on their side.

Then everyone is injured. Really, _everyone_. After Game 6, Lu is pretty sure that he and Schneids are the only two left who aren’t near-dead in some way, and he’s really not all that sure about himself. But he sucks it up. Despite not being the captain anymore, he still makes himself accessible to his teammates. Because the mood inside the blue paint radiates out to the rest of the team faster than mumps through the league, he forces himself to look calm even though his brain is screaming at him the inevitability of horrific embarrassment.

He’s about to go home so he can panic in peace when Schneids corners him. Schneids, who’s always so steady and sure despite his age, looks concerned. It nearly breaks him.

“I don’t think we can do this,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Lu replies, barely keeping his voice from wavering. “And sure we can.”

But they both know he’s lying about that last part, and the Bruins are right there waiting to prove it.

**5\. Eddie Läck, 2014**

He watches the team that almost made it fall slowly apart and knows, just knows, that he’ll be next to go. But one season turns to another, and he’s still there, and Schneids, who’s younger and better and cheaper, is the one who’s not. It should be a relief, to have the crease undisputably his own again, but it’s not, really.

He spends the offseason feeling strangely alone. When training camp rolls around, though, he meets Stork.

Stork reminds him of Noodles in all the best ways, except that he’s younger than Lu. He wants to hang out all the time, starts following Lu around like a puppy, but that’s good. Lu doesn’t really want to keep feeling alone, and this way he doesn’t have to. 

On offdays, he always has something to do and someone to do it with. They go to the zoo, or whale-watch, or explore the city’s parks, and he keeps Stork from eating too many tacos. Stork cracks jokes which are always funny even if they don’t always make sense, and his positivity is honestly infectious. 

Lu has other reasons to be positive, too, of course. The Heritage Classic is coming up - and playing outdoors sounds like a dream - and so is the trade deadline, the first in a long while that he’s not dealing with rumours upon rumours that he’s going to be traded.

Except Torts sits him on the Sunday, and suddenly everything’s in an uproar; the press corps only have three days to try and figure out where he’s going and they refuse to question him about anything else except what they’re calling “Stork’s betrayal,” which is ridiculous because the decision was Torts’ and Torts’ alone.

He ignores the calls and texts he’s getting from everyone on the team, hiding in his condo waiting for it all to pass.

Stork barges in on the Monday with the spare key Lu now wishes he hadn’t given him and demands, in a rush, to know if Lu is actually being traded.

His heart cracks, because if Stork is this upset and Lu didn’t know it he’s a bad starter and a worse friend. He gets up out of bed, wraps his arms around his lanky young backup, and says, “I’m not going anywhere.”

He wakes up snuggling his last rookie on the Tuesday to a text: he’s been traded home to Florida.

**6\. Al Montoya, 2015**

It may be the beginning of March, but it’s pretty clear they’re not going to make the playoffs. So when he takes a bad shot to the shoulder against Toronto, Lu figures it’s best not to push it. Al can finish the game. He takes a shower, changes into street clothes, makes sure his pads are put away nicely and nothing’s broken, and the guys come in and out and in again before he’s done. 

So when one of the assistant equipment managers comes rushing into the room with Tally in tow, he’s really not expecting it. Lu trips over his own foot and falls back into his stall, thanking his lucky stars he doesn’t hurt his shoulder or his head any worse than they already are.

Lu doesn’t have to ask to know what’s going on, and when he gets out of the tunnel he’s greeted by practically every defenseman and bottom-six forward on the team telling coach that they can do it, really, they played goalie one time in their peewee league and only let in six goals, and… but he tunes them out. The important thing is to talk to Al.

Al comes off the ice, and Lu follows him down the tunnel to the head trainer’s office.

“Groin?” Lu asks, and Al nods his head. “Right. I’m getting suited up again, shoulder’s a lot less bad than that.”

“I’m the backup. It’s my job to play so we can keep you healthy,” Al says, and crosses his arms.

Lu hasn’t had many backups bigger than him, but Al is one, and it’s at times like this that he notices it a hell of a lot more. But he wasn’t kidding about a shoulder injury being easier to deal with than a groin injury, and he’s pretty sure the delay while the league decides whether Tally is eligible will be more than enough time for him to dress again.

“Just because I’m the starter doesn’t mean I’m any more important than you. Besides,” he says, rotating his shoulder and slapping a poker face over his grimace of pain, “I’m totally fine, see?”

“No, you’re not,” says Al, and begins to slowly make his way back out to the ice. He gets scored on while Lu is putting on his pads, but the Leafs commit a penalty and Lu gets out onto the ice in the resulting stoppage, making his way smoothly to the net he thinks of, selfishly, as _his_.

“I can’t stop you, can I?” Al says, sighing.

“Nope,” says Lu, and backs into the crease.

**+1. James Reimer, 2017**

He goes down, his hip on fire, and all Lu can think is that it’s a very good thing he’s back in a tandem now, in the twilight of his career as he is. He thinks, now, that he understands how Kidder felt. It’s like his body isn’t under his full control, and he can’t move it the way he feels he should be able to. He doesn’t like feeling this helpless.

He doesn’t like feeling that hockey is slipping away from him before he’s ready for it to go.

Lu tries to rehab it in case they make the playoffs - but he knows they won’t. When Reims gets mown over in Toronto, he’s sure.

So there they are, the pair of them, left at home, injured and miserable together. He’s been here before, and he’s been strong before, but it’s always been for somebody else. Somewhere along the line, maybe years ago, the kid who found a second gear after he second-guessed has turned into the old man who relies on the needs of others to keep himself standing upright. And so it happens that Lu turns to see Reims smiling placidly, eyes shut, apparently unaffected by all of the misfortune and injury and pain surrounding this team, and bursts into tears.

They’re not the loud kind or the messy kind, just wet and streaming down his face, and Reims doesn’t notice until Lu’s nose starts to run and he has to blow it. He opens his eyes.

“Oh,” he says, and goes to fetch another tissue box.

They sit there in silence for a long time while his face slowly dries up. It doesn’t feel awkward. It does make Lu miss, a little bit, the youthful exuberance of Noodles and Stork, the quiet, stinging humour of Schneids. Reims is younger than all his former backups are, but he seems old and tired sometimes, moreso even than Lu himself does. There’s something of Kidder in him, maybe, a well of confidence-despite-pain that’s buried deeper in Reims than in anyone else Lu’s ever known. Really, the only difference between them is that Reims hasn’t yet given up.

The thought makes Lu feel very young and very old at the same time.

“I’m not going to pry,” Reims says, at last, “but if you decide you want to talk about it, you know where to find me.”

He makes to get up, and Lu means to let him. From anyone else that would be a ridiculously transparent ploy, designed to get him to talk whether he really wants to or not. But Reims actually means it, and Lu catches his arm without even thinking twice.

“It’s my hip,” he says, voice cracking. “My fucking _hip_ , like I’m an actual retiree, and I just…” But he can’t finish. He doesn’t have the words, in any language.

Reims kneels down next to him, like Lu himself had done so many years ago when Kidder cried and cried in front of him. He wants to scream. He wants to collapse. He wants to go find his trapper so he can hide his face in it and weep for what he’s come to.

He doesn’t. 

He sits very still and quiet as Reims gathers a few stray tissues from the floor. Reims looks up at him. Lu looks back. His eyes are stinging and they must be red but he isn’t crying now and he’s pretty sure he’s not going to for a while, either.

Reims holds Lu’s gaze, level and steady. He says, quietly, “You’re not too old.” The words seem to echo around the room for an eternity.

If Lu were Kidder, if this were fifteen years ago, he would be laughing now. He doesn’t feel like laughing.

“Thank you,” says Lu. He ignores the twinge in his hip as he joins Reims on the floor. “Just- thank you.” 

And as he hugs his backup - his _tandem_ \- Reims says, “You’re welcome,” simple and true and perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Tommy Salo was traded the season before Lu's debut with the Islanders. Technically, Lu took his job, I guess? Then DiPietro took it off them both.  
> 2\. Trevor Kidd's shoulder injury was caused at a skills competition when he tried to save a shot from one of his own teammates. His "next year" was with the Leafs. Mike Milbury was the Isles GM who traded Lu to the Panthers; he did occasionally refer to himself as "Mad Mike."  
> 3\. [The referenced zamboni spot.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxBjWe5nQUI) McLennan is now a talking head for TSN.  
> 4\. [Similar spot from a more evenly matched crease battle.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ap8tlQ3oZ0) Actually, the mumps joke is the only inaccurate thing in this story - the mumps outbreak happened a couple years after the Canucks' Cup Final.  
> 5\. I think Läck's love for Lu (and tacos) has been well-covered, but if you haven't seen it, here's [the backplate of his 2015 mask.](https://www.russianmachineneverbreaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/eddie-lack-mask-backplate.jpg)  
> 6\. [The "both goalies got injured" game.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iOPA-Mgdzg)  
> +1. I have A Lot Of Feelings about this team, alright? I thought I'd gotten them all out but apparently not.
> 
> \- The title is a slightly mangled mishmash of Latin & Italian that translates roughly to "and from pain, great glory." It comes from [the song that was stuck in my head while I wrote this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji0G0jqj1V4)


End file.
